Jessie was badly frightened, but she was not too scared to swim as hard
as she could for the diving raft. The lifeguard drove his boat around
the end of the raft toward the gray, sail-like object which had so
startled them all. Jessie remembered of reading that the dorsal fin of a
shark shows above water when it swims at the surface. This odd looking
thing must be it--it must be!
She measured the distance between it and herself with some calculation.
It came on in a halting, undecided way. Perhaps the shark had not yet
caught sight of any of the swimmers. Jessie flung up her arm and shouted
at the top of her voice to her chum:
"Come on! Come on! Don't let him get you!"
Amy was struggling so hard to reach the raft now that she had no breath
left for speech. Jessie saw her splashing on in her wake. Behind, the
boys were making a great splashing too, and Jessie realized that it was
for an object. The shark might be frightened away if they made
disturbance enough in the water.
Jessie was now very near the raft and the other three were bunching up
not far behind her. The lifeguard shot by in his boat, yelling like mad.
Darry shouted:
"Get aboard the raft, girls! Burd and I will beat him off till you are
landed!"
"You come right on here, Darrington Drew!" sputtered his sister. "What
good will you ever be if you get your leg bit off?"
Jessie reached the raft and seized a loop of rope hanging from it. If it
had not been for this assistance she doubted if she could have hauled
herself out of the water. When Amy arrived, her chum was lying over the
edge of the refuge, and reached one arm out for her.
"Quick! Quick!" cried Jessie.
"Do--don't scare me so!" gasped Amy. "I--I feel just as though he was
nibbling at my toes right now!"
But it seemed no laughing matter to Jessie Norwood. Her chum, however,
would find a joke in even the most serious circumstance. And the moment
she lay on the raft beside Jessie she began to laugh, gaspingly.
"This is no laughing matter!" Jessie declared. "How can you, Amy? Darry
and Burd----"
At that instant a wild shout rose from the two collegians and from the
lifeguard who had rowed so energetically to their rescue. Amy broke off
suddenly in her nervous laughter.
"He's got 'em!" she shrieked. "Oh! Oh!"
But, strange though it seemed to her, Jessie realized that Darry and
Burd were laughing. And the astonished expletives that the guard emitted
did not seem to show fear.
"What is the matter?" Jessie demanded, standing up.
"And where is the shark?" asked Amy, likewise scrambling to her feet.
The boys were hanging to the side of the guard's boat. He was fishing
for something in the water with an oar. He finally got the object and
raised it aloft.
"What is it?" repeated Jessie.
"The shark!" shrieked her chum.
It actually was all the shark there was--a pair of partly deflated
swimming wings which, carried here and there by the wind, had looked
like a shark's dorsal fin at a distance.
"Good thing you girls saw it," declared Darry, when the boys lumbered
along to the raft. "If you hadn't been so scared you never would have
beat us. Would they, Burd?"
"Of course not," agreed his friend. "And how Jess can swim--when there is
a man-eating shark after her!"
"Don't make fun," Jessie said, somewhat exasperated. "It might have been
a shark. Then where would you have been?"
"Either here or inside the shark," said Darry. "One thing sure, he never
could have caught you girls."
"Well," Amy sighed, "we had all the excitement of racing with a shark,
even if the shark was only in our minds. I'll never be so scared by one
again."
"Goodness!" exclaimed Jessie. "I know I shall always be nervous in the
water here after this. I'll always be looking for one. What an awful
feeling it is to try to swim when one is being pursued by----"
"By a pair of swimming wings," chuckled Burd. "Some imagination you've
got, my dear Jess."
There was a serious side to the matter, however. Although the shark
scare had proved to be groundless, the quartette decided to say nothing
about it to those ashore.
"Especially to Momsy," Jessie Norwood said. "I don't want to make her
nervous. Little things annoy her."
"She'll be some annoyed by little Hen, then," chuckled Amy. "Hen is
worse than any shark you ever saw."
"How terrible!" cried Jessie. "She is not a bad child at all, but she is
wild enough."
When they swam ashore later they found Henrietta on her good behavior
with Momsy. Nobody on the sands had chanced to see the excitement out by
the raft. Or, if they had, it was merely supposed that the four young
people from Roselawn were playing in the water.
Jessie, however, felt rather serious about it. And she knew she would
never go into the sea again at Station Island without thinking about
sharks.
While they were playing hand-ball on the beach, still in their bathing
suits, a low-wheeled pony carriage came along the drive from the upper
end of the island, and Amy's sharp eyes spied and recognized the two
girls seated on the back seat of the vehicle.
"And that's Bill Brewster driving!" cried Amy. "Some difference between
the speed of that quadruped and his sports car."
"One thing sure," chuckled Burd. "He can't do so much damage with that
old Dobbin as he did with the car he drives about New Melford."
"Belle and Sally have got a hen on," said the slangy Amy to Jessie. "See
them whispering together?"
"I can see what they are up to from right where I stand," announced
Darry, dropping the ball. "Come on, Burd! Let's beat it for the raft
again. That's one place those two girls can't follow us without bathing
suits."
"He, he!" giggled his sister. "I hope they sit right down here and wait
for you to come ashore."
"Send out our supper by the lifeguard," called Burd, as he followed his
chum into the surf. "We fear sharks less than we do a certain brand of
featherless biped."
"I suppose it would be too pointed for us to run away," said Amy to
Jessie, as Bill Brewster drove the pony carriage out on to the beach.
"Belle has got her eye on us, that is a fact," agreed Jessie.
She was curious, especially after what their new friend had told them an
hour before about the story that Belle Ringold was circulating. Belle
was eager to talk--as she always was.
"So your folks got one of these bungalows, did they, after all, Jess
Norwood?" she began. "I suppose you know there is no surety that you can
keep it a month?"
"I don't know about that. I guess father attended to the lease. And he
is a lawyer, you know," said Jessie, quietly.
"Pooh! Yes," said Belle, tossing her head. "But there are lawyers and
lawyers! My father has the smartest lawyer in New York working for him.
And I suppose you know about the claim he has against all the middle of
this island?"
"We have heard that _you_ have a claim on the island--or think you have,"
said Amy slyly. "But, then, Belle, you always did think you owned the
earth."
"Now, Miss Smartie, don't be too funny! Father is going to prove his
right to the golf course and all these bungalows. Don't you fear-- Why!
There's that terrible Henrietta Haney! How did she come here?"
"She is with us," said Jessie shortly.
"Oh, indeed! One of your week-end guests, I suppose?" scoffed Belle. "We
are entertaining General O'Bigger and Mrs. O'Bigger at the hotel. Of
course, we would not live in one of these small bungalows--not even if we
needed a vacation."
"You wouldn't," said Henrietta promptly, "because I wouldn't let you."
"Oh! Oh! Hear that child!" cried Sally Moon.
"Nor you, neither," declared Henrietta. "All them houses are mine--or
they are going to be."
"Hush, Henrietta," commanded Jessie, in a low voice.
"Didn't the funny little thing say something before about owning an
island?" asked Belle, somewhat puzzled.
"And this is it," said Henrietta. "You just try to come into any of them
bungleloos! I'd get a policeman and have him take you out. So now!"
"_Will_ you behave?" said Jessie, feeling like shaking the child, and in
reality leading her away.
Amy came running after them in the midst of Jessie's berating of the
freckle-faced girl.
"Did you ever hear such nonsense?" Jessie's chum demanded. "Belle
declares the case is coming up in court next week and that her father is
going to win. Did you ever?"
Mr. Norwood was sitting with his wife when they came near to that lady's
beach chair. Jessie was anxious enough to ask about Belle's statement
regarding the imminent court investigation of the controversy over
Station Island.
"Why, yes, Ringold's lawyers claim they have found new evidence
entitling him to be heard as a claimant to the Padriac Haney estate,"
the lawyer acknowledged. "But there may not be anything in it."
"But is there a possibility, Robert?" Momsy asked, seeing how anxious
both Jessie and the little girl looked.
"There is nothing sure in any case that comes into court," declared her
husband. "Besides, those attorneys of Ringold's are sharp fellows. He
may make his claim good."
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" burst out Henrietta. "And then I won't have
nuthin'? No island, nor golf link, nor--nor nuthin'? Oh, dear me!"
"Never mind, honey," Jessie begged. "You have friends. You have _me_."
And she sat down on the sands and took the freckle-faced little girl in
her arms.
"Ye-es, Miss Jessie. I know I got you," sobbed Henrietta. "But--but you
ain't a golf link, nor you ain't a bungleloo. And--and I want to turn
that Ringold girl off my island, I do!"